Strawberries

Antoine Vollon 1833 - 1900

Summary

Vollon conveys the sweet, aromatic juiciness of the strawberries and the crisp scent of the ripe pear by means of a rich, glossy colour palette. He brings a fresh approach to the genre with his talent for depicting the effects of light. His early years in Lyon were spent working for an enameller and engraver, and his appreciation of the reflective qualities of hard objects is evident in this painting. The scarlet berries glisten realistically in the simple setting of a plain white bowl against an opaque dark background. Vollon was born in Lyon. He made his career in Paris and achieved considerable success at the Salon from 1864 onwards. He produced some successful genre scenes, but is best known for his still life painting, inspired by the French eighteenth-century master of the genre, Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin (1699-1779) and by Dutch seventeenth-century art.